Joe Armstrong on multicore

Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, paid LShift a visit on Friday. He had kindly agreed to give a short talk to a few of my colleagues. We ended up cramming about twenty people into our meeting room, listening to Joe explain the implications of multicore CPU architectures for programming language design. There were lots of questions from the audience and some interesting discussions, keeping us a all occupied for nearly two hours. Matthew Sackman has posted his thoughts on some of the key points.

We covered a range of other topics too, including Joe’s recent idea of an Erlang/OTP Service Pack. This will be on a shorter release cycle than the main Erlang/OTP distribution, allowing changes and new features to be brought to a wide audience more quickly, with the best bits, hopefully, eventually making it into OTP.